ABSTRACT
Google scholar lists over 2000 articles mentioning ‘market devices,’ of which the vast majority was published in the new millennium, and more than 1200 since 2010. Increasingly, ‘device’ has been disconnected from the bodies of literature out of which it emerged. As a result, the concept is now also used as a substitute for everyday terms like ‘tool,’ ‘technology,’ or ‘instrument.’ This chapter assesses the recent intellectual biography of the term ‘market devices. With a British publisher, Market Devices makes the work of a range of French authors, who had until that time predominantly published in their native language, accessible to non-French scholars. It was strategic in presenting French actor-network theory and, to a lesser extent, French pragmatism to wider publics. The market devices program has, over the last decade and a half, been highly successful in channeling attention to the material dimension of markets.
